The present invention relates to a collimator for an optical fibre. It more particularly applies to the construction of optical switching devices.
Optical switching devices are known, which comprises a matrix of retractable light deflecting members and collimators associated with the rows of said matrix. Each collimator is provided with an optical fibre used for the emission and/or reception of a light beam. The function of the collimators is to control these light beams with respect to their direction and parallelism, in such a way as to be able to inject a maximum of light of any emitting fibre into a receiving fibre.
However, the commercially available collimators, e.g. those comprising devices with microdisplacements have very large dimensions and do not make it possible to produce sufficiently compact optical switching devices, incorporating matrices, whose spacing, i.e. the gaps separating two adjacent optical fibres is sufficiently small, e.g. approximately 10mm.